Friday, January 1, 2016

First day of a brand new year.

Our New Year’s Eve was pretty low key. Lise made a big pot of gumbo and we had some Yuengling beer to go with it. Kind of a Pennsylvania Cajun thing.  Lindsay’s family came over and we all yucked it up for a bit. I think everyone was in bed by 11:00 so the New Year pretty much came in without us.

Looking back, 2015 was an OK year. Some good things, some not so good things. We didn’t plan too many big trips, kind of restoring the coffers after the travel year of 2014. We got in a few trips but mostly for family stuff and the trips pretty low key. The avian species count for the year was 292 for me and 267 for Lise. The big difference was my work related Arizona trip. A co-worker on the trip was an excellent birder. I easily got 20 species just because of him.

I suspect this next trip around the sun will be a bit more interesting, probably in many ways. We have a couple trips planned, including Costa Rica in about a week. I’ve already started packing.  We plan on doing some paddling with Joanna up in Canada in May. Rich and I should be doing two weeks on the Appalachian Trail the end of June. Who knows what other adventures await us.

Today we wanted to start the year off right so we did a short local hike. The weather was dismally gray, and the breeze a bit raw, but we went anyway.  Things were pretty icy. Our local parks are the places nobody else wants. Mostly floodplain, can’t grow corn or build houses, so you make it a park. When the river is up the trails flood. The fun comes when the flooded trails ice over. You try to cross the ice fast before it breaks through and you get wet. That my friend, is adventure here in Okemos. Things can only get better.

Icy trails in Legg Park.

So one goal for this next year will be getting to some new places in Michigan. We tend to keep going to the places we know and really haven’t done this state justice.  The other is to ramp up my photography. Not just taking more images but taking better images. And getting better at processing those Images.  In particular, I want to get some good photographs in Lansing. I consider Lansing a pretty dreary place with few redeeming qualities. So I’m making it a goal to get some good images out of Lansing. If I can get even a couple good images from Lansing, I should be able to get good images anywhere.